Most of Ang Lee’s films are all situated in contexts of societal constraint: Austen’s England, seventies American suburbia, sixties Wyoming, and early 19th century China – all societies where codes of behaviour apply, even in the presence of hypocrisy. Accordingly, Lee’s characters tend to struggle with emotional repression. The appropriately named Lust, Caution is thus true to form in some ways.
Based on Eileen Chang’s short story, Lust, Caution is a study of passion and deception between the recently radicalized student Wong Chia Chi (Wei Tang), and powerful wartime collaborator Mr Yee (Tony Leung Chiu Wai), in Hong Kong and Japanese-occupied Shanghai during WWII.
Wong is an amateur student actress, but a quick study of character and mannerism. She falls in with an amateur patriotic troupe, targeting a key collaborator with the Japanese occupiers. Wong must be the irresistible bait to catch Mr Yee, but at some point genuine desire complicates her motivations.
Visually, the film displays Lee’s typical attention to detail across every aspect. While the colour and texture of the costuming is sumptuous, Lee focuses on the nuance of facial expression and social interaction, spending a lot of scene time in cuts between lingering facial shots, and light banter over a mahjong table. This observance of social nuance may be a particularly Chinese cultural trait, but it is also a common thread for Lee, who has made more English language films than not.
This focus and pacing also partly accounts for the film’s 157 minute duration. There is probably not enough content or dramatic momentum to sustain its length, but the film’s strengths in performance and in visual entanglement compensate for this. Tony Leung, a veteran of Wong Kar Wai’s films, is melancholically debonair, although also exuding here a darker, sexually predatory violence. It is gratifying to see his façade slowly dissolve under the charms of Wong.
The energetic lust of the film, climaxing in some unusually realistic sex scenes, works in juxtaposition to the incredible restraint with which the characters have to behave elsewhere. Maybe a little too much restraint for a western audience, because despite the sex scenes, some graphic violence and a sublime score by Alexandre Desplat (Syriana), the film resists passionate display up to the last, quiet, gasp.